Gemma Blackshaw

Teaching interests

Austrian art from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries;
Viennese modernism c. 1900;
French impressionism and post-impressionism;
Art and politics in twentieth-century Germany;
European art 1850-1950;
Portraiture;
Reception studies;
Museology;
'Outsider' art;
Dissertation;
European field trip.


 

Staff serving as external examiners

I am the External Examiner for the MA in History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London (appointed 2009).

 

Research interests
My main research interest is the competitive art world of Vienna circa 1900, and in particular the importance of portraiture in the making and breaking of artists’ careers. I have published journal articles and essays on artists such as Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, Anton Romako and Egon Schiele, and I have curated exhibitions which consider the important relationship between portraiture and psychiatry in the construction of modern Viennese identity (Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in ‘Vienna 1900’, Wellcome Collection, London and Wien Museum, Vienna, 2009-10; the work towards this exhibition was funded by an AHRC Major Research Project grant). My current book project, which is supported by the Leverhulme Trust, considers the importance of exhibitions to the making of the city’s modern portraiture, and modern portrait painters. This research will also be presented in a major international loan exhibition I am curating for the National Gallery London, to open in 2013.  

UoP Research group membership

Art History 
Centre for Humanities, Music and Performing Arts Research (HuMPA) 

Other research

 

Research degrees awarded to supervised students
Current PhD supervision:

'Representations of Neurasthenic Femininity in Late 19th Century French Art'

'Ethnography and the Visual Arts in Vienna, 1890-1930'


Current and past MRes supervision:

'The Collection and Display of African Material Culture in Vienna, 1876 - 1914' (AHRC-funded)

'Markets and Modernism: The Reception of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec'

'The Representation of the Laundress in Late 19th Century French Art'

'The Representation of Puerperal Insanity in the Late 19th Century' 

‘The Responsive Shift of Portraiture through the work of Francis Bacon’

 

Grants & contracts

2010 awarded Leverhulme Research Fellowship for single-authored book project Exhibiting Portraiture in Vienna 1900.

2007 awarded British Academy and Wellcome Trust Support for Conferences funds for the conference ‘Journeys into Madness: Representing Mental Illness in the Arts and Sciences, 1850-1930’.

2003 awarded AHRC Major Research Project grant for ‘Madness and modernity: art, architecture and mental illness in Vienna and the Habsburg Empire 1890-1914’. I was a co-applicant on this grant, managed by Dr Leslie Topp, Birkbeck College London.

2000-2002 awarded AHRC scholarship for PhD

 

 

Publications
Books:

Exhibiting Portraiture in Vienna 1900, single-authored book in preparation, supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

The Viennese Portrait, 1867-1918 (working title), edited book (London: National Gallery Company in association with Yale University Press, October 2013).

Co-Edited Books:

Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, co-edited book with Sabine Wieber (New York: Berghahn, June 2012).

Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, co-edited book with Leslie Topp (London: Lund Humphries, 2009). This is also available in German as Madness and Modernity: Kunst und Wahn in Wien um 1900 (Vienna: Christian Brandstätter, 2010).

Chapters in Books:

'Past/Present Faces: Writing the History of Viennese Portraiture c. 1900' in Blackshaw, ed, The Viennese Portrait.

'Self-Portraiture in Vienna c. 1900' in Blackshaw, ed, The Viennese Portrait.

'Plotting the Map of Mental Illness in Vienna c. 1900' (with Sabine Wieber), in Blackshaw and Wieber, eds, Journeys into Madness.

‘Peter Altenberg: Authoring Madness in Vienna c. 1900', in Blackshaw and Wieber, eds, Journeys into Madness.

'Scrutinised Bodies and Lunatic Utopias: Mental Illness, Psychiatry and the Visual Arts in Vienna, 1898-1914' (with Leslie Topp), in Blackshaw and Topp, eds, Madness and Modernity, 14-37.

'Mad Modernists: Imaging Mental Illness in Viennese Portraits', in Blackshaw and Topp, eds, Madness and Modernity, 46-65.

'Gustav Jagerspacher: Portrait of Peter Altenberg', in Blackshaw and Topp, eds, Madness and Modernity, 66-75.


Articles:

'Rediscovering Anton Romako' in 'From Ausgleich to Jahrhundertwende: Literature and Culture 1867-1890', Austrian Studies, Volume 16, 2008, pp. 105-122.

'The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategising in Egon Schiele's Self-Portraiture', Oxford Art Journal, 30:3 2007, pp. 377-401. 

'The Jewish Christ: Problems of Self-Presentation and Socio-Cultural Assimilation in Richard Gerstl's Self-Portraiture', Oxford Art Journal, 29:1 2006, pp. 25-51.


Review Articles:

‘Breaking the Mould?’ Review of Claude Cernuschi’s Re/Casting Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Art History, vol. 27, no. 2, April, 2004, pp. 335-34.

‘The eye of God?’ Review of exhibition catalogue, Oskar Kokoschka: Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin 1909-1914, Art History, vol. 26, no. 1, February 2003, pp. 127-129.

 

Reports & invited lectures
The making of 'Peter Altenberg: The Little Pocket Mirror', public lecture to accompany a film screening at the Neue Galerie, New York, 2 May 2012.

'Portraiture in Vienna c. 1900', research paper at the joint art history seminar organised by the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University and the Ashmolean Museum, 24 February 2011.

'Mapping Mental Illness in Vienna 1900: Journeys of an Exhibition', research paper at University of Nottingham, 17 March 2010

Participant in the round-table discussion for the AAH event 'Don't Ask For the Mona Lisa: Exhibition Collaborations Between Academics and Museums & Art Galleries', University of Leeds, 18 March 2010.  

Conferences organised

'Vienna's Van Gogh? Oskar Kokoschka meets Peter Altenberg at the Hagenbund, 1911', CAA, Los Angeles, 25-28 Feb 2009.

'Homo-Social Bonding? Egon Schiele and his early collectors' at 'Europa! Europa?' conference, Ghent University, Belgium, 29-31 May 2008.

'The re-discovery of Anton Romako: pre-modernist portraiture' at 'From the Ausgleich to the Jahrhundertwende: Vienna 1867-1890- pre-modernism and change' conference, St. Hilda's College Oxford, 2-4 April 2008.

I organised the conference 'Journeys into Madness: Representing Mental Illness in the Arts and Sciences, 1850-1930' at the Wellcome Trust in October 2007. The conference was supported by grants from the British Academy and the Wellcome Trust and included international speakers. My paper was entitled 'Pathological Portraits: Oskar Kokoschka at the Hagenbund, Vienna 1911.'

I chaired a strand at the Association of Art Historians annual conference at the University of Nottingham, April 2004. The panel was entitled ‘The Shattering of Old Law-Tables? Old/New Tension in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna’, and included international speakers.

http://www.aah.org.uk/confs/2004aah/2004s6.html

‘Hysteric Bodies: The Salpêtrière Photographs and Egon Schiele’s Self-Portraits’ at AAH annual conference, Oxford Brookes University, March 2001.

 

 

Other academic activities

Curating
Film and television broadcasting and production
Film, television and radio consultancy for BBC 4, BBC Radio 4, and ABC Radio (Australia)
 

Additional information

 

Links
For the Journeys into Madness co-edited book:
http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=BlackshawJourneys

For a film of the Madness and Modernity exhibition (Wellcome):
http://video.plymouth.ac.uk/tvb/17-12-09Madness_and_Modernity.wmv

For the Madness & Modernity exhibition catalogue in English:
http://www.lundhumphries.com/isbn/9781848220201